Designing Fairness
...it's surprisingly difficult. Of course, the creators of D&D, and the creators of pretty much every tabletop RPG, know this by now--that's why they have so many door-stopper-sized editions in which every action and spell and ability takes up rules that go for pages (I almost typed ages but that would have worked equally well)--just in case they accidentally overlook something and players everywhere immediately snigger with malicious glee and set out at once to take advantage of hapless DMs (who then, presumably, set up house rules to more than counterbalance that advantage).
However, I refer to Monopoly, a game where three factors at most are at play: 1) human choice, as far as trading goes, or whether to build or hoard or even to buy the property in the first place; 2) the game's intrinsics, such as the credit card debt or income tax or property values; 3) sheer dumb luck, which is what you get from the dice. By simply playing all four sides by myself, the first factor is eliminated: I've evenly divided up property amongst the player-characters by value (the maximum price payable for landing on that property) by using a lot of auctioning and trading, and none of them will be building houses until I want so. The second rule is just as easily overridden: my edition of Monopoly has options for toggling those things, so that credit card debt, income tax, etc, are set to zero and so the only remaining problems there are from Chance and Community Chest penalties, which generally even themselves out anyway.
The dice--those, on the other hand, are tricky. I'm typing this about 40 minutes into a game, and so far there's still two or three properties left unsold; very, very annoying. I'm reduced to just hitting Enter a lot to move the game along so that, by the law of averages, those last squares will be finally landed on, auctioned off, and then I can proceed to the next stage of the experiment which will consist of hitting Enter even more and seeing if it really does keep in balance; by which I mean I'll see how long it can go until one player at least goes bankrupt. Unfortunately, there's all sorts of other unforeseen variables toying with the game as well.
Things like, for example, Chance cards that send players to specific squares and cause the owner of those squares to make alarming profits; also, the fact that the airports are far apart that it's actually possible for a player, within two or three consecutive turns, to land on two or three of them; which is impossible for a set of three properties, because they're set closely enough together that the probability of hitting two of them in two consecutive rolls is maybe 1/36 or less. At the moment, in fact, the player owning the airports is leading by about 15 million (considering they all started out with only 20 million each, it's quite an amount).
I suspect I'll have a lot of time, in May, to design my very own first module RPG; whether anybody will actually play it with me is yet to be seen, but I've got some ideas--been harbouring them for awhile. Well, we'll see; at the moment, my premise is something along the lines of:
A bioweapon, recently created and apparently perfect (dissipates quickly, easy storage, heat- and cold- resistant, etc), is developed independently and simultaneously by three countries in a war; believing themselves at a last resort, they each use this trump card on each other and consequently about 70% of the population worldwide is wiped out, leaving only the 30% who happen to have a mutation making them immune to the weapon. However, exposure to the weapon's effects has had interesting effects on them--and soon they discover these effects also spread to 30% of all other multicellular life on the planet...
Of course this sort of a premise leaves the idea of magic- or fantasy- themed classes and abilities out, apart from a Magic from Technology sort of thing. Of course, like I've said, it needs refining--like what's spurring on the Brave Party of Adventurers in the first place, or the kinds of abilities/feats/skills/weaponry/etc that'll be usable--monster encounter charts, EXP charts, a consideration of a great many factors like climate and vehicle gas consumption rates, and so on. In fact considering all that, it'll be surprising if I don't end up with a bit of a Door Stopper myself. And yes, the premise is hardly new or original. I couldn't be more cliched if I tried--no, actually, I could make the weapon be a mutation-causing agent, or make it cause zombification, and so on--those would up my clichedness factor by a bit.
But the main fact behind all this is that I should be studying muscle mechanics. Which I, obviously, am not doing... well.
However, I refer to Monopoly, a game where three factors at most are at play: 1) human choice, as far as trading goes, or whether to build or hoard or even to buy the property in the first place; 2) the game's intrinsics, such as the credit card debt or income tax or property values; 3) sheer dumb luck, which is what you get from the dice. By simply playing all four sides by myself, the first factor is eliminated: I've evenly divided up property amongst the player-characters by value (the maximum price payable for landing on that property) by using a lot of auctioning and trading, and none of them will be building houses until I want so. The second rule is just as easily overridden: my edition of Monopoly has options for toggling those things, so that credit card debt, income tax, etc, are set to zero and so the only remaining problems there are from Chance and Community Chest penalties, which generally even themselves out anyway.
The dice--those, on the other hand, are tricky. I'm typing this about 40 minutes into a game, and so far there's still two or three properties left unsold; very, very annoying. I'm reduced to just hitting Enter a lot to move the game along so that, by the law of averages, those last squares will be finally landed on, auctioned off, and then I can proceed to the next stage of the experiment which will consist of hitting Enter even more and seeing if it really does keep in balance; by which I mean I'll see how long it can go until one player at least goes bankrupt. Unfortunately, there's all sorts of other unforeseen variables toying with the game as well.
Things like, for example, Chance cards that send players to specific squares and cause the owner of those squares to make alarming profits; also, the fact that the airports are far apart that it's actually possible for a player, within two or three consecutive turns, to land on two or three of them; which is impossible for a set of three properties, because they're set closely enough together that the probability of hitting two of them in two consecutive rolls is maybe 1/36 or less. At the moment, in fact, the player owning the airports is leading by about 15 million (considering they all started out with only 20 million each, it's quite an amount).
I suspect I'll have a lot of time, in May, to design my very own first module RPG; whether anybody will actually play it with me is yet to be seen, but I've got some ideas--been harbouring them for awhile. Well, we'll see; at the moment, my premise is something along the lines of:
A bioweapon, recently created and apparently perfect (dissipates quickly, easy storage, heat- and cold- resistant, etc), is developed independently and simultaneously by three countries in a war; believing themselves at a last resort, they each use this trump card on each other and consequently about 70% of the population worldwide is wiped out, leaving only the 30% who happen to have a mutation making them immune to the weapon. However, exposure to the weapon's effects has had interesting effects on them--and soon they discover these effects also spread to 30% of all other multicellular life on the planet...
Of course this sort of a premise leaves the idea of magic- or fantasy- themed classes and abilities out, apart from a Magic from Technology sort of thing. Of course, like I've said, it needs refining--like what's spurring on the Brave Party of Adventurers in the first place, or the kinds of abilities/feats/skills/weaponry/etc that'll be usable--monster encounter charts, EXP charts, a consideration of a great many factors like climate and vehicle gas consumption rates, and so on. In fact considering all that, it'll be surprising if I don't end up with a bit of a Door Stopper myself. And yes, the premise is hardly new or original. I couldn't be more cliched if I tried--no, actually, I could make the weapon be a mutation-causing agent, or make it cause zombification, and so on--those would up my clichedness factor by a bit.
But the main fact behind all this is that I should be studying muscle mechanics. Which I, obviously, am not doing... well.
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